Live Kinect holography experiment

I had some fun together with my children and created a live holographic display.
Kinect holography uses a technique commonly known as Pepper’s Ghost. It was invented more than 150 years ago and is often used in theme parks or museums. A recent trend is to use it for product displays with animated special effects.

Kinect background removal

One of the things that can easily be done with the Kinect SDK is to extract a single person from the live image feed. I modified one of the samples in the Kinect SDK to show the background removed image fullscreen on a black background.

The PC is on top of a duplo structure with it’s display pointing down. The image is reflected in a 45 degree tilted glass plane.
The kids are wearing light colored clothes so they reflect better. I used an extra light that was on the floor in front of the kids.

The real magic happens if there is an object behind the glass plane that the person in front of the Kinect can sit in or stand on.